Implementation

Digital Data Exchange

You do not need to be a member of DDEX to implement any of its standards within your technical infrastructure. Also there is no charge for implementing DDEX standards. DDEX standards have been widely implemented across the digital supply chain by digital retailers, digital distributors and aggregators, record companies, music rights societies and various technical service providers. These implementations have been deployed by major digital music players, both members and non-members.

Starting an implementation

Technical information gathering

Before starting the technical supply chain’s integration process, both, the senders’ and receivers’ operations personnel, need to gather the technical information and business requirements to configure their part of the supply chain. The information usually includes:

After receiving the business and technical information, the sender and receiver need to configure their supply chain to accept/receive the communications. The orchestration tests could include (s)ftp server and Web Servers communications, depending on the chosen choreography. DDEX has defined three different protocols by which various different entities (usually record companies or aggregators) can communicate ERN messages to their business partners. These are:

Web services;

Release-by-Release via SFTP; and

Batched SFTP.

The order in which Releases need to be ingested in the first two cases is obvious from the order in which the information is being provided to the recipient. The order in which Releases need to be ingested using the batched SFTP approach requires additional explanation.

It is this batch folder creation date/time, and not the creation date/time of the ERN files within the batches that determines the order in which a recipient needs to process the communicated Releases.